


As if some little Arctic flower

by empressearwig



Category: Pink Carnation Series - Lauren Willig
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Harry Potter Setting, Alternate Universe - Hogwarts, F/M, Fake Dating, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-14
Updated: 2019-12-14
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:54:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21794878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/empressearwig/pseuds/empressearwig
Summary: Or, how to meet and fake date your soulmate on the first day of school.
Relationships: Sally Fitzhugh/Lucien Caldicott
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	As if some little Arctic flower

**Author's Note:**

  * For [quilleth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quilleth/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide!

"They say he's a vampire."

Sally Fitzhugh turned to look at her friend Agnes, who was sitting next to her on the long benches at the Hufflepuff house table, watching the first years move through the line to be sorted. Like most everyone else in the Great Hall, her attention wasn't on the littles, but was instead focused on the boy who was most definitely not a first year bringing up the rear of the line. At least she hoped he wasn't a first year. He was too tall and too handsome, and if he was secretly eleven having had a bad experience with an aging potion, life would be too cruel.

"Don't be silly," said Sally shortly. "But who is he?"

Agnes's eyes went wide in shock. "You haven't heard? But you hear everything!"

Sally sniffed, and poured herself a glass of pumpkin juice. Agnes wasn't wrong, but lately, Sally had been wondering what the point of all of it was. In a year, none of them would be at Hogwarts anymore, and knowing everything about all of your classmates didn't seem much like a marketable skill. Not that Sally needed to work exactly, not when her family had more gold than Gringotts would let them keep in one vault, but one liked to feel useful.

But the welcome feast wasn't the time for woolgathering. "Tell me," she said to Agnes. "What is someone our age doing in line with the ickle firsties?"

Agnes looked left and looked right, before dropping her voice to a whisper and leaning into Sally's ear. "His name is Lucien Calidicott, he's Hal Caldicott's cousin, you know, the Slytherin fifth year?" 

At Sally's nod, Agnes went on. "He ran off to America to live with his mother's family after his parents died, his aunt is some sort of famous witch in New Orleans. But he's going to inherit Belliston Hall next year, and so--"

"He came back," Sally finished, a speculative look on her face. "I didn't think you could transfer schools."

Agnes shook her head. "I heard he wasn't at school. Something about Ilvermorny not offering Herbology. His mother was an accomplished Herbologist, you know."

Since Sally hadn't known who he was, she hadn't known that either, but there didn't seem much point in dwelling on unnecessary details like facts. "I wonder what house he'll end up in."

There wasn't time to think about it, because the line had finally come to him. "Lucien Calidicott!" 

He stepped forward and put on the hat. Sally held her breath. 

"SLYTHERIN!"

He took the sorting hat off and passed it to Professor McGonagall, before moving in the direction of the Slytherin table. He seemed resigned, more than excited, and his cousin's face was a mask of barely suppressed anger. That was interesting. Maybe she wasn't out of the knowing everything business after all. Maybe she'd just been waiting for the right thing to know. 

"Herbology, you said," Sally said to Agnes, her eyes fixed on the dark head of Lucien Caldicott, surrounded by his new housemates. 

Agnes nodded. 

"Well, it's a good thing that we have Herbology first thing tomorrow morning, isn't it?" Sally said with a smile and a toss of her blonde curls, before applying herself to the roast beef that had appeared before her. 

No sense in trying to solve a mystery on an empty stomach, after all. 

***

Lucien surveyed his new home for the next nine months with some dismay. When his Uncle Henry and Cousin Hal had talked about the Slytherin House dormitory, he hadn't really taken them seriously about the dungeons. He should have known they wouldn't be anything less than literal. The only mercy was that Lucien didn't have to share a room with Hal, who hadn't been excited to see his return from Tante Berthe's home in New Orleans. He remembered Hal as a tagalong, who'd been his happy shadow. 

Things has obviously changed. 

He wondered, not for the first time, if he'd made a mistake in coming back to England. It seemed that whatever delicate balance they'd all found after his parents deaths had been upset, and it seemed unlikely that it could be recovered. He laughed silently at himself. Recovered? When he hadn't even begun to act on his reason for returning?

One very rarely found a murderer without kicking up some dust. And Lucien intended to do just that. His parents memory deserved the truth, and he knew that he'd never truly be at peace without knowing just what had happened. 

Every Herbologist that Lucien spoke to or sought out to study with had said the same: there was no way that his mother, the most gifted plant witch that any of them had ever met, would make such an elementary error. The manzanilla plant was distinctive, and anyone with the barest knowledge of plants could identify it. Which was why the Ministry magistrate had suspected a far more foul turn of events. 

But Lucien had lived in that house, had seen his parents at play and work and rest, and there had been no reason for a murder-suicide. However unexpected their marriage was to wizarding society, it had been a happy one. Lucien would bet his life on it.

And so here he was, back in the place that he'd repudiated when he'd run off to Tante Berthe's before boarding the Hogwarts Express, all those years ago. He had no desire to waste a year of his time at school. But even his aunt had said that he'd have been a fool for not taking the chance to study under Professor Pomona Sprout. 

But none of that mattered now, when he was trapped here at Hogwarts. All that mattered now was to learn what he could, so that when he graduated in the spring, he could do his all to restore the good names of his parents. He owed them at least that much. 

Lucien sighed, and closed his eyes, wishing for sleep that would not come.

***

The next morning, Sally was more eager to reach the greenhouses than she had ever been in her life. It did not go unremarked upon by Anges. 

"What's going on?" Anges puffed, as she tried and failed to keep pace with Sally's longer legs. "Did Professor Sprout promise to let you choose our NEWT lab partners if you were first through the doors or something?"

"Don't be silly," Sally said shortly. "She'd never pass up the chance to pair me with Lucy Ponsonby. It's her favorite form of revenge for Turnip not being the slightest bit botanically inclined."

"His name is actually Reggie," Anges pointed out, as they came to the tall glass doors of Greenhouse Seven, where they'd been told to report.

"Details," said Sally, with a wave of her hand. She surveyed the crowded work tables with a critical eye. Clearly, she had not been the only one to get the idea of arriving at class early for a word with their newest class mate. She wondered how many students had gone to their head of house the night before, begging to be let into NEWT level Herbology, though they'd given it up after OWLs. 

Lizzy Reid waved to them from their usual table in the back, her copper colored curls bouncing around her cheeks, and Sally and Agnes picked their way through the crowd to join her. No matter that Lizzy was in Gryffindor, the three of them were a determined trio in this class and even Professor Sprout had given up on trying to split them up. 

"Hullo!" said Lizzy cheerfully, once they were in earshot. "Do you reckon the new boy has any idea what he's in for?"

Sally narrowed her eyes at her friend. Lizzy had better not mean to include herself in Lucien's number of admirers, or really, given Lizzy's effect on the opposite sex, plan to number him in her cadre of lovesick hangers on. There were quite enough of them already, and Sally didn't mean to waste a perfectly good breakfast getting sick to her stomach over Ear-Splitting Sandwort. 

Unfortunately, Lizzy noticed the look and she chortled. "Is that how it is?"

Sally tossed her hair. "I don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about." It wasn't really a lie. Sally hadn't even spoken to the boy, how could she possibly have feelings for him? For all she knew, his Byronic good looks came with a side of terrible garlic breath, though she supposed that if by chance the vampire rumors _were_ true, that was unlikely. But she did want to know more. And no one, not even one of her two best friends was going to stand in the way of that.

As if on cue, Lucien walked into the greenhouse, flanked by two Slytherin seventh years, both girls, Sally noted with disgust. It truly wasn't fair the way that you ate and slept and took classes with your own house. How was anyone else supposed to get a word in edgewise?

He stopped at the front of the class to say hello to Professor Sprout, who sent his female fan club off with a wave of her gardening gloves. A short conversation that Sally would have given her eye teeth to hear followed, and then Professor Sprout sent him away too. But he wasn't joining the Slytherins who were beckoning to him for all they were worth, he was headed straight towards their table and Sally tried discreetly to straighten her robes.

"Hello," he said, his voice a strange mix of accents. "Professor Sprout told me that it's only ever the three of you. I wondered if I might join you?"

Sally didn't have to look, to know that Agnes and Lizzy were staring at her expectantly. She could feel their eyes. "Of course!" she said, brightly. "And you are--"

"Lucien Caldicott," he finished for her, holding out his hand to shake. "It's a pleasure to meet you--"

"Sally Fitzhugh," Lizzy supplied helpfully. "She's Sally and I'm Lizzy and this is Agnes. And I think I speak for everyone in the room, when I ask, what's a nice boy like you doing in a greenhouse like this?"

"Lizzy," Sally hissed under her breath. The last thing they needed to do was scare him off so that he'd run to sit at any table but theirs during the next class. Oh, she was going to murder her friend later.

But Lucien laughed, slowly at first and then with more vigor. He laughed and laughed, and just like that, Sally's heart fell to the floor at her feet. This had not at all been the plan.

***

Whenever Lucien had thought of what he'd missed out on by not attending school, somehow laughs among friends had never featured prominently in his imaginings. And really, why would they have? When he'd run away, he'd been grieving. Making friends had not been something he'd even considered. And yet here he was, on his first full day at Hogwarts, laughing harder than he could remember at something that hadn't even been all that funny.

Life was strange.

"To be honest," he said, once he could speak again, "I'm not at all sure. I half expected to be turned away at the gates."

"And would it have been less than you deserved?" Lizzy asked, with an arched brow. "From what I hear, you did much the same to Hogwarts. Bolted at Kings Cross, yes?"

"Yes," he admitted. He looked between the girls. "Is there rather a lot of that going around?"

"Gossip?" asked Agnes.

He nodded. 

"I'm sure we wouldn't know anything about that," said Sally. He noticed the warning look she shot her friends with interest. "Right, girls?"

Lizzy laughed. Agnes shot Sally an incredulous look. And Sally, she looked badly like she wanted to stamp her foot. Clearly, their responses had not been what she hoped for.

"What else would you like to know?" he asked. Better to cut the gossip off at the pass, he supposed. Not that it would stop the rumors. It never did.

"What made you come back?" asked Lizzy. "Surely there was a reason. The allure of a drafty castle in a Scottish winter is not that great. We should know after six of them."

Lucien hesitated. It was one thing to desire honesty in the name of dampening rumors, and another to say that you had returned to avenge the deaths of your dead parents. He was aware it would make him sound rather like a lunatic. 

"I wanted to study with Professor Sprout, actually," he said, settling for a half truth. "She was a colleague of my mother's. They had quite the owl correspondence before she died."

Lizzy looked like she wanted to press the matter further, but Professor Sprout was indicating for them all to don their fuzzy earmuffs, and the rest of the class was conducted via increasingly ridiculous hand gestures, miscommunication, and muffled laughter. It was so relaxing that Lucien could not say that he was overjoyed when class ended and they all removed their ear protection.

"Thank you for letting me intrude on your group," he said, as they all left the greenhouse together. He looked back over his shoulder and found his Slytherin classmates eyeing him the way that he imagined predators eyed their prey before embarking on a hunt. "It was a...timely intervention."

Lizzy looked back, and then back at him. Her eyes were clearly lit with mischief in a way that Lucien had already learned to find alarming. "You know, I believe we could help you with that."

***

At Lizzy's words, Sally's eyes went wide and she grabbed her friends arm. "Lizzy," she hissed, but it was already too late.

"What you need is a fake girlfriend to scare them off," Lizzy said, cheerfully ignoring the way that Sally's fingernails were gouging into her arm. "And I have just the woman for the job!"

Sally snuck a look at Lucien, who looked less shocked by the suggestion than she would have expected. Maybe he'd already worked out that Lizzy was insane, in which case, it spoke to his good sense. 

"Agnes?" Lucien asked, deadpan.

Lizzy frowned at him. " _Sally_."

"You don't want me," Agnes said, shaking her head. "I'm a terrible liar. Ask anyone."

"But does Sally want me?" Lucien countered. He looked in her direction, and smiled. "I'm sure you'd make an excellent fake girlfriend, but it doesn't seem like something that your friends should just volunteer you for."

" _Thank you_ ," Sally said with feeling, glaring at both Agnes and Lizzy. 

"That wasn't a no," Lizzy said, undeterred. "Don't pretend you think it wouldn't be fun to put one over on everyone else. I know you too well, Sally Fitzhugh."

The sad fact of the matter was that Lizzy did know her too well. And pretending to be Lucien's girlfriend would certainly be a cure for the general malaise with which she had started the school year. 

But she liked Lucien. She might even like him enough to want to really be his girlfriend. And she'd certainly read enough romances to know that the fake relationship was a time honored tradition that often led to a real one. But was it a risk she was willing to take?

She looked up at Lucien. He smiled at her, and she could tell he was completely prepared for her to say no. Unfortunately for him, it triggered all of Sally's most pig-headed instintics, which he couldn't have known and Sally was equally sure that Lizzy had counted on.

"I'll do it," Sally said. 

***

Lucien couldn't have heard her correctly. 

People didn't go around offering and accepting offers to be someone's fake girlfriends. Especially when the person in question hadn't even made the request! This was madness. All of it.

But still, it wouldn't do to be rude about it. He quite liked Sally and Lizzy, and Agnes too, for that matter, and he strongly suspected that they could ruin his life as easily as they could save it. He just didn't think that the situation with his Slytherin housemates was so dire as to require such a subterfuge. 

"Er," he said.

The Slytherins in question joined them where they stood in the doorway to the castle proper. One of them, he thought she was called Claudia, took his arm, with a degree of possession that Lucien found alarming. 

"You've had him long enough, girls," she said. "We'll be happy to show Lucien to his next class. You have Charms with us next, don't you? Too bad that Hufflepuff aren't in that class with us."

Her tone implied it was anything but too bad, and from watching Sally bare her teeth at Claudia, he knew he had read the room correctly. He knew what the Hogwarts rules said about magic in the corridors, but he had enough girl cousins to know that when looks like that came out, so too did wands. He had to do something to stop from getting properly expelled on his first day of school.

"Actually," he said, extracting himself from Claudia's grasp with some difficulty. "Sally has already offered." He held out his hand. "Shall we? Wouldn't want to be late."

For a moment, Sally looked surprised, but she covered it quickly and reached out to put her hand in his. She looked at Claudia with a sickly sweet smile. "If you'll excuse us?"

Hand in hand, they walked away from the rest of the group. He could only trust that Sally was leading him in the right direction, since he truly did have no idea how to get to his next class. They rounded several corners in rapid succession, and then Sally pulled him into an empty classroom. The door closed behind them.

Sally turned to face him, her back against the door. Her eyes were filled with laughter and she had the widest smile he'd ever seen on her face. It made her beautiful. He didn't understand how he hadn't noticed that before.

"Did you see their faces?" she exclaimed, and burst out laughing.

He couldn't do anything but join her. And for the second time that day, Lucien laughed harder than he could remember doing for years. There was something about this girl, this school. He should have come home years ago.

When they'd both finished laughing--Lucien could only hope Sally's side hurt as much as his did--and they were staring at each other once more, he asked, "Did you mean it?"

She blinked at him. "Mean what?"

"That you'll be my fake girlfriend." He hesitated, forged on. "It's just--you were rather, pressured? Pressured into it, let's say."

Sally looked affronted. "No one pressures me to doing anything I don't want to do, I think you'll find."

"Right," Lucien said. "I suppose that's a thing that I should know if you're going to be my fake girlfriend."

"Why do you keep saying it that way?" Sally demanded. "Fake girlfriend this, fake girlfriend that."

"Did you have a term you preferred?"

Sally frowned. "No. Just… stop saying it, that's all."

"Noted. My pretend paramour would prefer not being referred to as such," he said, hoping to make her laugh again, and sure enough, he drew a reluctant chuckle. "But really, Sally. Is this actually something you want to do?"

"Is it something _you_ want to do?" she countered. "I didn't notice you jumping for joy at Lizzy's suggestion."

"It would not have been my first choice of solution to my problem," he admitted, hoping that the honesty would impress her. "But the scene outside the greenhouses convinced me I misjudged the situation. I believe that Lizzy's suggestion might be my best strategy. Offense makes the best defense, they say."

"I don't care for sports," Sally said apologetically.

"But do you care about protecting defenseless transfer students from the clutches of overeager housemates?"

She took a moment before she answered, and his stomach plummeted down towards despair. "I do."

"You do?" he asked hopefully. 

She nodded, quick and decisive. "I do."

He wasn't going to wait for her to take it back. "Shall we shake on it?"

Sally shook her head and to his complete and utter shock, stood up on her toes and kissed him. 

It only lasted a moment, and she was gone before he could so much as kiss her back. When she rocked back on her heels, and looked up at him, he knew he was gaping at her like a hooked trout.

"It seemed more the thing for a fake relationship," she explained. She opened the door and held out her hand. "Charms?"

He let her take his hand and lead him out of the classroom. 

***

Nine months later, when school ended and Lucien had proof that his parents had been murdered by his uncle, they were still holding hands. As it would happen, they never would stop holding hands for the rest of their lives.


End file.
